Starbucks' new offering, dubbed Verismo, will be able to make lattes and espressos as well as brewed coffee, which is more than Green Mountain's Keurig brewers currently offer. To its credit, Green Mountain released a latte maker, called the Vue, in February. It also plans to offer a one-cup espresso machine late this year or early 2013.

Green Mountain shares, which are typically volatile on a daily basis, recently dropped 9.3% to $27.94. The stock is down 38% this year.

Bad news in the Spanish bond market this morning. Two-year yields are rocketing higher, up to about 6.51% at last glance. Yields on the 10-year Spanish bond are up too and well beyond the 7% area, to 7.45%. Investors are demanding higher and higher yields because they’re seeing Spanish bonds as increasingly risky. Why do they look riskier today versus two weeks ago?

It likely has something to do with the fact that the Spanish regions are increasingly raising their hands and indicating that they too could use a little help making their debt payments.

That essentially adds to the burden on the Spanish government. Today there’s word that the Spanish region of Murcia might be close to following the lead of Valencia, which asked for help on Friday, according to Reuters.

Tradeweb

Spanish yield curve, flattening hard and coming closer to the flattest days of November 2011, when the market was really panicking over Europe.

The fact that Spanish short-term yields are shooting higher than long term yields is a particularly bad sign.

At a minimum, it means that it’s getting a lot more expensive for Spain to borrow even for relatively short amounts of time. Issuing short-term debt is a traditional way that countries that have dodgy looking credit continue to borrow and fund themselves. The increase in short-term yields means even this option is getting less helpful.

But from a bigger perspective, the fact that shorter-term interest rates are becoming nearly as expensive as longer-term rates says a couple of different things. In a normal world, interest rates on short-term debt are cheaper than longer term debt.

In simplest terms that’s because investors traditionally demand to be compensated for tying their money up for longer periods of time. But when yield curves flatten, it suggests investors are increasing their bets that some kind of default could occur or the economic outlook looks like it could worsen. In this case, it’s like to be both.

If there were any lingering doubts about what’s been driving stock prices over the last week or so, the markets did their best to clear that up today, as equities got a healthy bounce following crude’s late afternoon slump below the $130 a barrel mark. Airline stocks roared higher — AMR jumped 8.2% — as [...]

Shares of Starbucks were down 7.5% in premarket action, after the company said traffic in its stores fell for the first time since the company started keeping this figure. Also, the coffee shop giant reduced its earnings and same-store-sales-growth estimates for the coming year, despite a 35% increase in profit for the third quarter. The [...]

Yesterday, Tim Hanrahan pointed out that Starbucks spent hundreds of thousands of dollars last year flying Chairman Howard Schultz hither and yon. Today, he takes a look at Wrigley’s proxy and finds a similar big wad of gum: William Wrigley Jr. & Co. disclosed in its annual proxy that Chairman William Wrigley Jr., the great-grandson [...]

Tim Hanrahan weighs in with this peek at a juicy detail in the Starbucks proxy statement. Starbucks disclosed in its proxy filing late Wednesday that Chairman Howard Schultz racked up about $476,000 worth of personal use of company airplanes last year. The company notes that executives and their families occasionally fly on company aircraft as [...]

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